


Obligatory Professor Sans

by Teddy_Feathers



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 06:21:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7255978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teddy_Feathers/pseuds/Teddy_Feathers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>tbd</p>
            </blockquote>





	Obligatory Professor Sans

Dr. Sans. There was a title he never wanted.

But his brother had been insistent.

Science…

He loved science don’t get him wrong, but having a doctorate like Gaster? There was some emotional baggage he wasn’t ready to deal with - and never intended to. Besides he wasn't like Alphys. His sense of curiosity and wonder around the possibilities had been worn down. 

He was lazy.

He’d rather do nothing.

So he became a professor. All the perks of standing behind a hot dog cart and no one actually minded if the dogs flailed to meet the requirements of being dogs and turned out to be water sausages instead.

He even published a book. Course it was a joke book but still. Everyone seemed proud of him for being so productive.

They greatly overestimated what being a college professor was like.

While Alphys slaved away pushing reality’s, but no longer moral, boundaries Sans sat behind a desk with his feet propped up.

While his brother and Undyne protected the King and Human ambassador. Sans wrote out really obscure science puns and gave extra credit to whoever laughed.

He didn’t have to work all hours but if needed, he could make work to keep the existential dread at bay.

So he didn’t mind the perks but...

It’d taken threatening to automatically flunk - retroactively if need be - his students to get them to stop calling him doctor, professor, or even mister.

They wanted to show him respect? Respect his preferred lack of title.

At the beginning his students thought he was a cool teacher. He didn't assign homework, projects, grade for participation or keep track of attendance. In fact some days he just sat at the front of class with his feet propped up catching Zs.

Took until the mandatory midterm for them to realize that they had learned nothing about the course material... and even assuming they got full marks for the final there was little chance of anyone walking out of there with a pass.

Instantly his class shot up to the hardest physics class. The one with the least amount of signups despite his being the only monster teacher on staff.

The students he did get came into class with a grim determined air about them. They’d ask questions but had no idea what they should be asking. It didn’t help that often times, sans would get them side tracked into really interesting but not on the test material.

He looked down his new semester's roster and the students files, pondering it a bit. It was not the sort of class an English major should be. The student in question had expressed interest in technical writing, which probably explained why she needed a science credit… but his class wasn’t for anyone not one hundred percent invested in science.

Not that he was picky.

But sans only expended as much effort teaching as the students did learning.

And after that first semester word had spread that the only way you were going to get anything out of sans class was to be wholly committed.

See, he thought of it this way - They would always have access to their books information. Very rarely did you have access to someone with enough scientific know how to make a self-sustaining tornado, fold space, or comprehend the complexity of time.

While he taught all course levels it was an undeniable fact that NONE of his classes were for beginners. This kid must have failed to study up on her professors, or missed early registration.

He added her to the list of students he thought would wash out before add/drop date, and continued down the list, determining how many of the students would be worth his effort this semester.

* * *

She walked into the class unsurprised to see only a handful of students there.

After all, Ratemyprofessor had him down as the laziest teacher and his class passibility rating was in the negatives. But even as half the people in the room were hunkered down grimly bracing themselves for the long haul to come, there were a few bright and cheery faces of either freshmen who thought having a monster professor would be neat, or had heard about how smart likeable and funny he was and were naively looking forward to their first physics lesson.

Lastly were the over prepared, scarily intense group of students. Those who'd heard how hard the class was and chose to be here. Either for the effort justification or simply because they thought they’d get more practical value out of the class.

She didn’t belong to any of those groups. She’d come here for Dr. Sans specifically yes, but not because she was ignorant of or looking forward to essentially self-studying an entire semester of physics.

No...She was too lazy for that.

 In fact that’s why she was going into technical writing. Easy money turning already complied information into research papers.

Mostly she was here because of the joke book.

She didn’t know what had first drawn her eye to it, maybe because it was on sale and she needed a laugh, maybe because it had won the Winton Prize a book award for popular science books. Maybe because it was written in comic sans by sans serif. Whatever the reason she’d picked it up.

And it had saved her life.

It wasn’t that she wanted to die for love it was... How it suddenly hit her that her life was about letting go.

She didn’t show she cared in traditional ways. If her sister didn’t pester her to take her places she probably would never leave her apartment aside from school- and once she got her degree? She’d be even more isolated.

Friends didn’t find her interesting or entertaining. They saw her lack of desire to do much as a sign she was disinterested or uncaring... And if it made them happier to ditch her shed let them go. Ce la vie. No one thought she was worth putting up with for the long hall, even her sister got exasperated with her lack of ambition. But really she couldn’t see a point to it all. It didn’t really matter what she did in the long hall, she’d do her bit and then die alone.

When her boy friend left... It really drove that home. She was less than a nonentity - she was a burden to those who invested any time or energy into her. It’d be better if she didn’t stick around.

It was an odd sort of panic. To feel numb, empty, drained and yet going around and packing so she could leave everyone she cared about behind. She would let go of them, it was what was best for everybody. Once she was gone…Well she’d decided what to do then.

In the midst of her packing her eyes fell on the book. The cover was inscribed in comic sans and the tag line saying "weighed down by problems... And gravity."

It was stupid but she snorted.

She picked the book up and flipped through it desperate to push back the creeping horror and despair that came from simply existing when it’d be easier to do just about anything else. Some of the jokes were like the one on the cover lame and easy to understand. Some took bit of thinking to get but that made them all the better when she puzzled them out.

Most of the jokes though were way past her understanding. There were equations and terminology that even when she looked it up she didn’t understand. 

And on the last page it said “the biggest joke” of all, followed by a string of symbols that she actually recognized as wingdings of all things. When she finally managed to translate it, all it said was “existence”.

By this time it was really late or really early depending on how you viewed it and she started laughing so hard she had tears coming trailing down her face. Which woke up her sister and reminded her she couldn’t leave. Her sister would be devastated. She couldn’t do that to her.

She had something to live for no matter how hard it was.

That joke book had saved her life... And there were so many things in it that a simple google search couldn’t teach her.

Shed decided to write the author a letter, but to say what? “Thank you for saving my life?” or “What the hell do half of these even mean?” You wanted to know but you also were curious about the author himself.

Who wrote in comic sans, wingdings, said that existence was a joke and had a firm grasp of theoretical physics? If it was a joke the punchline was: A college professor.

Sure this class was going to be insanely hard, but... The book had saved your life, you needed to take science classes anyways and you were curious, really invested in something for the first time in years.

Flunking would be worth it.

Not that she intended to fail but realistically physics majors failed this class all the time. She was an English major. Not to say English majors were dumb but the spectrum of learning rarely crossed. She WAS interested though, so shed actually made use of the planner her sister had bought her for the first time and high lighters and multicolored post it notes. Shed even brought and turned on the damn tape recorder.

Her sister was such a scholastic champ.

fifteen minutes into the first class and things were off to a great start. Three of the freshmen had already left thinking they were getting away with something having a valid excuse to leave. One or two of the others were looking around worriedly. You’d gotten bored and pulled out the joke book and was idly flipping through it.

Thirty two minutes and only four of you were still in the room when the professor shuffled in.

There were several suspiciously red stains on his dingy lab coat and one of his bunny slippers was missing an ear. Even if he hadn’t been a walking skeleton he'd look like something out of a horror movie.

He got to the desk, sat down with his feet propped up and began flipping idly through their course book. She couldn’t help but stare, she had the strangest notion he hadn’t even looked at it before today.

One brave soul raised his hand. The students shot glances between the him and the professor mixed between incredulity and obvious relief that it wasn’t them.

She lifted her book to cover her grin. It was like a train wreck and she couldn't look away. This was awful; this was going to be terrible... And honestly even if you didn’t learn a damn thing in this class you wouldn’t miss a single second of whatever slow torture the professor was going to enact on you and your fellow classmates.

* * *

 

He slept in that morning intentionally. Grabbed his bagged lunch, and took his time tinkering around his office. At thirty-one minuets past the start of class he meandered in, blatantly ignoring the students. He didn’t test the classes resolve this hard and fast usually but there were so many kids to weed out that it was beneficial to start early.

Or maybe he was just being a lazy ass.  Not that he had one of those. An ass that is.

Either way he skimmed through the book getting a feel for the order things were presented in and see where the cut off for the midterm exam was going to be.

A kid in the front row raised his hand and sans felt his grin growing more genuine. And so it begins.

He didn’t look up, still flipping, and the kid let out a not to subtle cough. His continued dismissal garnered a snicker from one of the other students and that did catch his attention though he didn’t show it. People with an honest sense of humor were enjoyable to have around.

"Professor Serif?"

There it was. He felt that old irritation flash through him and he stopped flipping. Not looking up he shrugged. "Try again kid."

“Oh um. Doctor serif I-”

“Strike two.”

“Sir?”

He could say he felt bad for what he was about to do. But he wasn’t. Not really.

There was one in every class and it was the human custom, but it was the only way to insure he only heard it once per class. Anyways being a teacher was great except for all the students - so cutting them down was always easier.

"Fail." Now he looked up and leveled a stare at the kid.

He floundered looking around him for support but finding only wide horrified stares, and one girl who was hiding behind a worn book shoulders shaking.

“I'm sorry? I don’t understand...”

“Kid my names sans. If you can’t even figure out that much how do you expect to learn something complex, like under water basket weaving?”

He could see a couple of the students pale and check their schedules to make sure they hadn’t in fact wasted their first period sitting in the wrong class, but he kept his focus on the kid in front of him.

“Professor, I mean Doctor - sans I'm”

“Still messing up my name? Yeah you are. Beat it kid. You flunked out.”

“But it’s the first day of class! You can’t do that!”

He kept up his stare and watched the kid go through the seven stages of grief twice before he grabbed his things and left. He'd only ever had one kid stay after had failed them for something so arbitrary.

When he walked into class the next day and asked the kid what he thought he was doing there, he’d said he was there to prove him wrong. Sans had used him for all of his demonstrations, was harder on him then the rest of the class combined and the kid had been the only one to ace all four years of classes with him before going off to be the physics wonder grad student.

Some kids had the right sort of attitude for science. Some didn’t.

The girl with the book and the shaking shoulders started laughing. Hard. She dropped the book on her desk and buried her face into her hands as the others looked on with worry and disgust.

“What’s so funny?”

“This class is a joke and our punchline is the grade.”


End file.
